The poignant epigraph to Forester’s Howard’s End, “Only connect,” has become a guiding force in my digital pedagogy, which now over-emphasizes interactions between students and not just responding to assignments. Initially, with my driving concern looking more like translating content into a digital platform, my courses placed all the emphasis on students responding to that privileged content, but my teaching has evolved to emphasize helping students learn to be responsively engaging with each other online over literature, composition, and video in meaningful ways. This involves redefining “exchange” and its descriptors “meaningful” and “responsive.” Similar to the face-to-face classroom management, in the digital classroom, students need to be taught how netiquette, discussion, both full class and semi-private in workshops, and file exchange can be used to great effect; these aspects of the platform are at the center of my pedagogy. Be it experienced graduate students or undergraduates with an unknown communicative skill set in any context, this connective pedagogy may pose different issues with different students. So the issue is for me is, in a very real way, to quote the Talking Heads, “Same as it ever was.” And that is: how do we make engagements meaningful and responsive creating small intimate moments of wonder over content that is so valuable in the English classroom? This paper examines provocative answers and preliminary data analysis to help answer this question.
About the presenterAlison J Matika
Alison’s research focuses on audience studies and what we talk about when we talk about teaching English. She completed her BA in English Literature at the University of Pittsburg, her secondary teaching credential at the University of Texas at Austin, her MA at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English, and both her MPhil and PhD in English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.